HNoMS Harald Haarfagre

HNoMS Harald Haarfagre was a Norwegian coastal defence ship, built at Elswick and nearly identical to her sister ship Tordenskjold. She and her sister, with the slightly newer Eidsvold class, were built as part of the rearmament in the years before 1905, and she was named after Harald I, the semi-mythical first king of a united Norway, known in English as Harald Fairhair. She was a pre-dreadnought battleship on a small scale, carrying two 8.2-inch guns in barbettes, six 4.7-inch, six 3-inch and six smaller quick-firing guns, with seven inches of belt armour, barbettes with nearly eight inches of steel and an armoured deck, and a speed of over seventeen knots. She was an important vessel of the Royal Norwegian Navy until she was judged unfit for war in the mid-1930s and disarmed. After the German invasion of Norway she was seized and rebuilt as a floating flak battery named Thetis. After the war she served briefly as a floating barracks and as a transport for German prisoners before she was sold for scrapping in 1948.